🌊 Tidehollow

Survive a sea that's your clock, map, enemy, and pantry.

The game in plain English 🐚

Twice a day, the sea here pulls all the way back and lays the seabed bare. 🏖️ Reefs, shipwrecks, springs, and stranded creatures sit out in the open, just waiting. Then the water comes home and swallows everything low. 🌊

You lead a small band of survivors who live by that rhythm. When the tide drops, you run: send your people across the flats to grab food, scrap, and fresh water before the water returns. ⏳ When the tide rises, you shelter: process what you gathered, feed your people, and build on high ground. 🏗️

Every low tide also strands a living creature in front of you, and every one is a small choice with a clock on it. Eat it now and you have food today. 🍽️ Or carry it back to the deep and let it go. The creatures you save grow a living Reef offshore, and a healthy Reef makes every future tide richer and even warns you when danger is coming. 🐠 So the smart, kind play is to take care of the sea instead of stripping it bare.

You never beat the sea. You learn to time it. And over a long campaign, as the water keeps creeping higher, you stop fighting it and finally learn to float. ✨

It is cozy but epic, bright instead of grim, and built for phones in short three-to-five-minute sessions. 📱

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The one idea

Most survival games drop resources onto a map that never moves, and time is just a fuel gauge ticking down. Tidehollow moves the whole world instead.

One number, the water level, rises and falls on a tide clock, and that single number does four jobs at once:

The tide is...	What it means
The clock	Low tide is a timed window
The map	What you can reach changes completely with the water
The threat	Get caught below the line and the sea takes everything
The pantry	Every low tide leaves food and life behind

Because one thing you can see carries all four meanings, you always know your danger at a glance. Everything else in the game grows out of this.

One cycle: Ebb, Turn, Flow

A single turn of the tide is one play session, and it runs in three beats.

1. The Ebb (the rush). The sea pulls back and a countdown starts. You send survivors across the bared seabed to gather six raw goods and free stranded creatures before the water returns.
2. The Turn (the squeeze). A horn sounds and the water visibly climbs. One more haul, or pull everyone back? Anything left below the line, including your people, is gone.
3. The Flow (the calm). High water floods the low world, so you turn inward: process your haul, build on high ground, and tend your people's needs and hope.

Who you send

Survivors are people you get to know, not workers you swap around. Each has needs, can grow stronger, and can be lost to the returning water.

Survivor	What they do
Forager	Covers the most ground, fast
Diver	Reaches the richest tiles, most likely to be caught
Mender	Heals people and lifts their spirits
Engineer	Builds and repairs
Stray	Spots stranded creatures early

The soul: mercy and the Reef

Every low tide leaves a creature stranded, and saving it instead of eating it grows a living Reef offshore. A healthy Reef means richer tides, gifts that wash up at your dock, and at the highest bond, Tidekin that surface to warn you before a King Tide or a storm.

Mercy literally buys you safety. Strip the flats bare instead, and the sea goes quiet and stingy.

Building: elevation is everything

Every tile sits at a height. Build low and you are next to the richest ground, but the water drowns it. Build high and you are safe, but far from the sea. Drying racks go low because you can rebuild them. The food store goes high because you cannot lose it. ==Where you build matters more than what you build.==

The Deepening: the long arc

Across a campaign, the baseline creeps higher. Tides get nastier, storms sweep away what you leave loose, and a King Tide rises far past the line and comes for your home itself. The ground you farmed is lost for good, so you move uphill, raise seawalls, and finally make the only peace that lasts: you stop fighting the water and learn to float.

Who it's for

Mobile players who love the depth of survival and colony games but want something bright, clear, and beautiful instead of grim and punishing. One turn of the tide is a satisfying short session. One settlement is a hundred-hour project. It also welcomes the cozy crowd with a home to grow and a Reef of creatures to collect.

What we'd build first

A vertical slice that proves the loop is fun before anything else gets added:

• [x] The Tide Engine: one honest water level that breathes over a grid of heights
• [ ] One coast with real heights and the full Ebb, Turn, and Flow loop
• [ ] Five survivors, the six goods, and the gather-to-build chain
• [ ] The save-or-eat choice with a Reef that visibly grows
• [ ] One storm, one King Tide, and one leaderboard

The Tide Engine is the riskiest part and everything depends on it, so it is built first and proven fun before any content goes on top.

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The one rule that keeps it honest: every feature must read the tide, get ready for the tide, or grow out of kindness to what the tide leaves behind. If it does not, the feature is wrong, not the rule.

Built With

• meta
• meta-horizon